Release Management hangs and there is no log in place…

This week I encountered a very strange error with release management 2015.1 (so the old, grey, WPF version)

We upgraded our TFS server to 2015.1 and everything was fine. We started a release and everything was fine. But the second time we started a release it only went through the first stage of our release pipeline and then it froze.

After that the release did not work any longer. It processed the pre deploy check, and then it stopped.

After a reboot it worked again (1 time) but then it stopped again. And again. I followed this post and switched on logging but in the directory that was reference there was no logging that was useful.

After a call with Microsoft we found that the logs were written to c:\windows\temp\… Instead of the location referenced in the web.config. There we saw an error that had a 401 unauthorized inside.

0-2-2016 15:20:29 – Verbose – (4708, 4384) – A workflow execution is completed with state.Faulted System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.
at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.EndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.WebRequest.PlatformHttpClient.

EndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.WebRequest.RestClientResponseRetriever

.EndGetAsyncMemoryStreamFromResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult, IPlatformHttpClient platformHttpClient)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.WebRequest.RestClientResponseRetriever

.EndDownloadString(IAsyncResult asyncResult, IPlatformHttpClient platformHttpClient)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.WebRequest.RestClient.EndPost(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.Proxy.RestProxy.HttpRequestor

.<>c__DisplayClass0_0.<GetPostCaller>b__0(String url, String body)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.Proxy.RestProxy.

BaseAutomationEngineNotificationServiceProxy.DeploymentStart(String deploymentXml)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Workflow.Activities.

DeploymentSequenceActivity.<>c.<.ctor>b__89_2(String baseUrl, String s)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Workflow.Activities.

DeploymentSequenceActivity.Execute(NativeActivityContext context)
at System.Activities.NativeActivity.InternalExecute(ActivityInstance instance, ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager)

We also saw this error in the security event log.

After some searching we found this KB article (link) that talked about the loop back check (I know that one, it caused me headaches before).

This blogpost explains quie nicely what the loopbackcheck is for.

After fixing the registry as described in the KB article and a reboot of the server it worked again.

I cannot wait for Release Management going live on prem. We can already start playing with 2015.2 RC1

Hope this helps !